Heideggerian Phenomenology

Abstract

Was Heidegger a phenomenologist? Can his work be considered phenomenological? Can he be affiliated with phenomenology in some way beyond biographical contingencies? The answer to these questions is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. In the following, I propose to address these questions by starting from a typology of the literature on Heidegger. My hope is that with such an overview it will become easier to identify a specifically phenomenological (as opposed to hermeneutical, deconstructionist, etc.) development in and of his work.

Was Heidegger a phenomenologist? Can his work be considered phenomenological? Can he be affiliated with phenomenology in some way beyond biographical contingencies? The answer to these questions is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. In the following, I propose to address these questions by starting from a typology of the literature on Heidegger. My hope is that with such an overview it will become easier to identify a specifically phenomenological (as opposed to hermeneutical, deconstructionist, etc.) development in and of his work.

Unlike many philosophers, Heidegger was neither unknown nor obscure during his lifetime. Having acquired a reputation early in his career,¹ his works have by now been widely read, interpreted, and developed in variegated directions. A side-effect of this longstanding, broad reception is that the field of Heidegger studies is so differentiated, dispersed, and fragmented that it becomes impossible to adjudicate conflicting claims on a purely conceptual level. There are simply not enough shared assumptions to open a genuine debate among the rival interpreters (hermeneuticians, deconstructionists, pragmatists, phenomenologists, etc.). This state of non-communication is reflected at an institutional level as well. The different types of Heideggerians have, by now, competing societies, conferences and even summer workshops.²

I propose to remedy this situation by way of what might be called a ‘philological reduction.’ I want to look at the literature by bracketing the claims made by interpreters concerning Heidegger’s philosophy and focusing instead on the philological foundations of those claims. By organizing the different readings according to the empirical ways in which they take-up Heidegger’s texts, i.e. what counts as central, what is marginal, what relates to what, etc., by indexing claims to their textual conditions of possibility, we can produce a simple taxonomic classification of the field. Having carried out this simplification it will be easier to identify a specifically phenomenological reading of Heidegger, to appreciate its context and to understand its limitations. While previous presentations of the literature have organized the field according to competing conceptual claims or varying interpretative decisions (we can call these first-order claims), my scheme is more akin to a meta-study (a second-order view).³ Whereas, on a first-order level, the mutual intractability may suggest that it would be impossible to find a level of analysis to which all groups might acquiesce, on the meta-level all such differences disappear.

The following are the second order categories of Heidegger interpretation employed in this paper. First, I make a distinction between scholarly readings (SR), focused historically on the texts and on the development of Heidegger’s thinking, and selective syncretic readings (SSR), focused more on linking selected topics in Heidegger to non-Heideggerian material. Within the scholarly readings, I distinguish three approaches: a genealogical reading (GR), focused on early texts and the continuity of the corpus, a teleological reading (TR) focused on later texts, and a dual-phase reading (DR), which emphasizes the distinction between earlier and later phases organized around a “turn.” I will focus on GR, the genealogical reading. This reading further divides into a strict construal that is very heavily focused on textual sources, and a loose construal, that aims to emphasize the specificity of Heidegger’s individual works. Finally, I argue that Heideggerean phenomenology should be located in the loose construal of the genealogical reading. This is the “phenomenological interpretation” of Heidegger, that emphasizes the Kant book and other earlier sources.

1 The Philological Reduction – SR vs SSR

Regardless of how interpreters of Heidegger construe his topic, goal, or method, in order to count as readings of Heidegger, they would sooner or later have to make contact with Heidegger’s writings. This is where my typology of readings sets in. How do the different readers refer to the texts (and again, we are ignoring their properly philosophical claims in those texts)? What do they focus on, what do they take into consideration, and what do they leave out of consideration? What patterns do we find when the mutually opposed groups are reduced to their textual bases? To begin with, adopting this level of analysis has the merit of placing all readings on one plane – after all, to count as an interpretation of Heidegger, any reading must contain a discernible construal of Heidegger’s texts.

As far as these texts are concerned, they are published in the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (complete edition), in non-chronological order.⁴ As of this writing, 95 volumes of the 102 total have been published. There are 16 volumes containing everything that Heidegger published during his lifetime (these range from 1910 to 1973). Another 47 volumes contain fully developed manuscripts used in his lecture courses (1919–1944). Some 17 volumes contain completed but unpublished book manuscripts. Finally, 20 volumes contain more fragmentary teaching materials, notes and diaries.

The first obvious distinction to make in the literature on Heidegger is between interpretations that tackle a large number of the above volumes and those that do not. This is a distinction between what I will call scholarly readings of Heidegger (because they seek to make a contribution, among other things, also to the scholarship of the complete works) and selective-syncretic readings of Heidegger (because they syncretically relate selections from Heidegger to material foreign to him). This basic distinction yields a number of descriptive features.

The selective-syncretic readings (SSR) have a smaller footprint in the GA and do not consider the task of accounting for the whole of Heidegger’s work to be of philosophical interest. The selection of Heidegger’s texts is based least of all on context or chronology. Instead, they read Heidegger in connection with and through works by authors foreign to Heidegger. As such, this literature harbors interdisciplinary, emergent, but also anachronistic topics. These approaches are highly innovative with respect to Heidegger, insofar as they connect his ideas with material that he had never engaged with. The preponderance of English-language, indeed U.S. American, work on Heidegger fall in this camp. The two most well-known representatives of SSR are Hubert Dreyfus in Analytic philosophy and John Sallis in Continental philosophy.

In the case of Dreyfus, it is well-known that in his most widely read work, the textual base in the GA is limited to approximately one half of Being and Time, Sein und Zeit (SZ hereafter). Even there, the resources he draws upon to elucidate Heidegger’s ideas are drawn from a wide array of figures beyond Heidegger. The selection is importantly not led by context: Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, Latour, James and Dewey all play roles.

In the case of Sallis, the textual base in the GA is wider, but not in any way systematic. While various works are analyzed in distinct moments, there is no project of attempting to account for the whole of those texts. At the same time, Heidegger is read through insights developed by his philosophical progeny, so to speak, namely Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida.

Both of these approaches led to novel consequences. Dreyfus, based on his interpretation of Heidegger, famously developed an early critique of certain forms of artificial intelligence (AI) and subsequently oriented generations of his students towards a theory of what he called “skilled coping.” A good compendium of the work of two generations of Dreyfus students is Wrathall and Malpas (2000a, b). Sallis for his part, crafted readings of classical German philosophy on the topic of the imagination, and later in a series of works rooted in Plato’s Timaeus, developed a project he termed “chorology,” after the Platonic chora. Freydberg (2012) Maly (1995) both attest to the influence of Sallis. The common denominator in all this is that Heidegger of course was either ignorant of these topics (AI) or had paid little attention to these texts (the Timaeus).

Grouping these two highly influential U.S. American Heideggerians together will undoubtedly raise eyebrows, if not incite outright insults! Despite the familiar way in which Analytic and Continental philosophers are opposed, the philological reduction here places the two camps together, united in the empirically observable ways in which they reference Heidegger’s GA. The major distinction in Heidegger literature now turns out to be not one between Analytic Pragmatists and Continental ‘Postmodernists’ but rather a distinction between Anglophone Analytics and Continentals on one side, and French-German historical, contextualists on the other side.

The scholarly readings of Heidegger (SR, as opposed to the SSR), as already mentioned, are characterized by the attempt to account for all of Heidegger’s works – all or as many as possible. They thus put considerable effort into integrating every new publication of the GA, which they reference in the original German. They are also bibliographically more holistic viz. the GA, or more ‘conservative’ depending on one’s perspective. When SR makes a foray outside of Heidegger’s works, it is into contextual texts and authors. Distinctive features of the outcome of this approach are an account of the development of Heidegger’s thought as well as insights into his linguistic manner of expression. While SR has explanative power with respect to Heidegger’s texts, it does not foray into the emergent topics, the interdisciplinary extensions or the subsequent figures after Heidegger. Instead, these interpretations develop the discourse tied to traditional philosophical notions such as subjectivity, time, freedom, truth, art etc. The overwhelming majority of work stemming from Europe has fallen into this camp (Table 1).

Table 1 Two types of Heidegger readings

2 Species of SR: GR, TR and DR

For the sake of my goal here, I will now suggest some distinctions, still of a purely philological nature, which can be observed within the field of SR. I propose to further distinguish the scholarly readings into three subgroups: the genealogical, the teleological, and the dual-phased readings of Heidegger (GR, TR, and DR respectively). One group of scholarly readers have organized their bibliography so as to investigate the genealogy, or the origins, of Heidegger’s philosophy. These latter (GR), privilege chronology, linear development, and a continuity of project, striving to stay true to Heidegger’s earliest, more classical insights. Their claim is that these insights and commitments are never dropped but only developed in continuity thereafter. Another group foregrounds later writings, explicating texts where Heidegger employs his most challenging modes of presentation. These texts are taken to be the telos towards which the early work is striving (hence TR), and thus the interpretation takes from the early only that which elucidates the late. Some of the significant contributors here were also post-WWII acquaintances of Heidegger such as Jean Beaufret and Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann, but also younger scholars such as Reiner Schürmann. Finally, the dual-phase reading (DR) accords autonomy to two separate spheres of thinking within the Heideggerian corpus, the early Heidegger vs the late Heidegger, construing them almost as two entirely different philosophies. The names that stand out here reach back to some of the earliest publications on Heidegger such as Alphonse de Waelhens (1942), and William J. Richardson, S.J. (1963).

While my tripartite grouping of the scholarly readings remains largely applicable today, capturing most activity in the field, it is also the case that the three groups are not as equally active anymore. Here, my taxonomy departs from the purely empirical philological scheme – though only very minimally. Within the field of scholarly readings, the predominant amount of activity in recent years has been within the genealogical readings. This is because, I would suggest, DR has been exhausted and TR contradicted. As far as DR is concerned, ever since its first articulation by Bill Richardson, S.J., it has faced the problem of being unable to adequately explain the alleged “turn” from Heidegger I to Heidegger II. Postulating two autonomous philosophies with distinct sets of texts cohering around two chronologically separated epochs raises the obvious question of the relation between the two. While attempts will undoubtedly continue to be made to solve the problem of the “turn,” the communis opinio has largely abandoned that paradigm in recent decades.

A similar fate has met TR, though this development is not as widely noted. But that is likely due to the relatively less conventional appeal of the TR paradigm to begin with. The motives behind this development are rooted in the publication history of the collected works. Starting in 1989, the GA began publishing manuscripts from the completed but unpublished set (these are GA64–73). The major manuscript from that set, GA65, the Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis), contains elements of Heidegger’s ‘auto-interpretation,’ or self-critique. Written roughly ten years after SZ and reflecting on that decade’s intellectual itinerary, Heidegger, in GA65, explicitly rejects a teleological relationship between his works, rejecting the notion that his later works are the culmination of his earlier project. This same rejection of TR has resurfaced in other volumes which have been published since (e.g. GA66, GA69, also viz. his Kant-book of 1929). Although one might argue that this rejection is but one interpretation among others, the fact that Heidegger himself is the origin of the rejection has likely contributed to the demise of TR (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Scholarly readings of Heidegger

3 GR

Regardless of the reasons behind the demise of the TR and the DR paradigms, it is empirically the case that GR has been ascendant over the last two decades. But it is important to note that the prototypes of this interpretation were already developed during Heidegger’s lifetime by German philosophers, e.g. Otto Pöggeler (1963), as well as Heidegger’s former students, e.g. Walter Biemel (1976). While the first exemplars of GR were penned by Germans, the most influential work in this vein, both for the US and Europe, was undoubtedly Ted Kisiel (1993). In fact, Kisiel’s work turned the attention of Anglophone readers back to his European predecessors, e.g. the unjustly neglected Italian Franco Volpi, as well as Jacques Taminiaux, both of whom then enjoyed a delayed reception in English. These readings always privilege chronology, while also affirming an evolution in Heidegger’s “path of thinking,” but this is an evolution which has more continuity than is implied by the ‘the turn.’

More concretely, what this means is that Heidegger’s works are understood viz. a sequence of authors whom he had studied in an empirically ascertainable order. We know that Heidegger entered the University on a church scholarship, having declared theology and natural science as interests. Once enrolled however, the bulk of his training focused on Aristotle and Medieval Philosophy. This culminated in his dissertation on medieval logic and grammar in the work of Thomas of Erfurt (pseudo-Duns Scotus). Given this well-defined body of work, GR seeks the foundation of Heidegger’s magnum opus, SZ, in Aristotle (or in Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretations). The beginning of Heidegger’s professional career subsequently brought him into the proximity of Husserl and of his circle; this move is contemporaneous with Heidegger shifting the focus of his attention to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is in this period that the publication of SZ occurs and, therefore, GR seeks the methodological orientation thereof in Kant (or, again, in Heidegger’s Kant interpretations). Beyond the magnum opus, in tracking down the subsequent decades, GR serially engages with Nietzsche, Hölderlin, the Pre-Socratics, Ernst Jünger, and so forth, guided by the chronological sequence in which Heidegger wrote about them.

The evolution of GR has led to some basic high-level claims garnering broad consensus among interpreters. To begin with, it is now fairly well understood that the analysis of being-in-the-world is (or emerges out of) an interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VI, or the intellectual virtues, arête dianoetike. The set of distinctions between praxis-poesis, phronesis-techne, is widely taken to be the core constituent⁵ of Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit, canonically, if unfortunately, translated as ‘authenticity’ since Macquarrie & Robinson (1962). What Heidegger terms the ‘existential analytic’ overlaps with what he refers to in his earlier works as a ‘hermeneutics of facticity.’ That, in turn, consists in an Aristotle interpretation focused on the Nichomachean Ethics but with the important, and original, addition of the Physics as key to opening the dimension of existence called the ‘movedness of factical life.’ This latter is the idea that life (later: care, and thus time) can be analyzed as structured by what Aristotle calls kinesis. As these few statements already suggest, one feature of GR, particularly when strictly construed, is that the specificity of individual works by Heidegger is dissolved into a much larger project with very broad scope. The side effect of this is that topics that occur in isolated fashion throughout the corpus receive little explication.

Here, I would suggest it is useful to make a further distinction, though it will be admittedly less empirically obvious and less philologically clear-cut. We can roughly separate a strict construal GR from a loose construal GR. In the strict construal, the identification of sources takes the upper hand and the predilection for continuity in the corpus leads to an undervaluing of ideas which do not occur over a broad stretch of time. I would contrast this with the loose construal GR, i.e. an approach which is mostly contextualizing and mostly genealogical but tries to preserve the specificity of individual works and topics by resisting a reduction to sources.

I argue that Heideggerian phenomenology is located in the loose construal of GR. In other words, it is only when the texts have been construed in this particular way that Heidegger has emerged as a phenomenologist and it has only been on this philological basis that Heidegger’s works have been developed with strictly phenomenological goals and interests. Which is to say that debates between phenomenological, pragmatist, hermeneuticist and deconstructionist interpreters of Heidegger are really not debates about the same author, much less the same topic. We see here, I would argue, in the field of Heidegger studies, an excellent illustration of Thomas Kuhn’s insight into the different function of paradigms in the natural sciences and in the humanities (or ‘creative disciples’ in his terminology). Whereas paradigms in physics succeed one another sequentially (such that, e.g., it is no longer possible to hold to the Newtonian paradigm for the orbit of Mercury), in philosophy, on the other hand, paradigms only multiply and do not replace one another (e.g. Kantian ethics has not replaced Aristotelian ethics but exists alongside it) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Heidegger readings

4 Phenomenology and Heidegger

The obvious reason why Heideggerian phenomenology is encountered in loose GR is above all that Heidegger makes positive references to phenomenology in a set of texts clustered in a specific period of his oeuvre. The less autonomy is attributed to this textual cluster, the less phenomenological Heidegger’s philosophy will appear. While this period does not have precise termini, it is conventionally thought, per Greisch (1994), that 1919–1929 constitutes Heidegger’s “phenomenological decade.” The biggest reference points in that cluster are: (a) the claim to phenomenology as method in 1927, in SZ; (b) two manuscripts eight years apart, both entitled Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1919/20, GA58, and 1927, GA24) (c) five manuscripts in between carrying the term ‘phenomenology’ in the title (these constitute the Aristotelian sub-cluster): Phenomenology of Intuition and of Expression (1920, GA59), Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920/21, GA60), Phenomenological Interpretations on Aristotle (1921/22, GA61), Phenomenological Interpretation of Selected Aristotle Treatises on Ontology and Logic (1922, GA62), and Introduction to Phenomenological Research (1923/24, GA17); (d) a substantial analysis of Husserl (with some reference to Brentano) in a manuscript misleadingly entitled History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (1925, GA20); (e) a manuscript from 1927/28 entitled Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (GA25). Taken individually, outside of this contextual cluster, any one of these references can look like a highly idiosyncratic version of phenomenology. However, read as a genealogical whole, they display an intrinsic, evolving, thematic focus as well as a clear continuity with their intellectual context (the main rivals of phenomenology in Germany during that period, Neo-Kantianism, Lebensphilosophie and Weltanschauungsphilosophie are all targets of Heidegger’s arguments in these texts).

It is important to note as well that this cluster of texts has only been accessible in English relatively recently. Of the eight phenomenology books mentioned above, five have only become available in English translation since 2001, the most recent one dating from 2013 and one is still untranslated as of this writing. This is a very late development as far as the history of the interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy is concerned. When one considers the publications of the main champions of alternative paradigms of Heidegger research, particularly in the Anglophone world, it is clear that their limitations are correlated with the lack of access to texts. Some notable exceptions to this are to be found in Dahlstrom (1991) who chronicles the evolution of Heidegger’s writings on Kant, as well as more recently Engelland (2017) who presents a more recent interpretation of the transcendental nature of Heidegger’s phenomenological project. Works on Heidegger’s Aristotle studies in light of SZ can be found in McNeill (1999) and (2006). A first, basic commentary in English on Heidegger’s analysis of Husserl in GA20 can be found in Moran (2000). But perhaps, the biggest representatives of the phenomenological development of Heidegger are to be found in France and Germany. In order to move things along more quickly I will now point to just a few French works and leave the German ones for another occasion.

Working out Heidegger’s project as a specifically phenomenological one, and thus as extending rather than rejecting Husserl’s project, has been the hallmark of Françoise Dastur’s work from Dastur (1990) to Dastur (2016). Central to her approach to Heidegger is the idea, found in SZ §7, according to which the phenomena of phenomenology are not directly given and thereby make phenomenology necessary as method to begin with. This methodological directive to wrest the phenomenon from the given, being from beings, resonates with Husserl’s directive of a reduction or epoché of the given. This methodological state of affairs is what makes phenomenology suitable to Heidegger’s ontological project, to the point that the two, phenomenology and ontology, according to Dastur (2016), become synonymous.

From the outset, her work has championed the notion of time as the central focus of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. Thus, Dastur (1990) works out the foundational role of temporality in Heidegger’s philosophy and brings it again into the proximity of a Husserlian phenomenology which considers consciousness to be ontologically grounded in time. While noting such points of affinity between Husserl and Heidegger, she is nonetheless careful to emphasize where Heidegger goes beyond Husserl, e.g. on the issue of the finitude of time, the relationship between truth and history, or the contrast between the ego and Dasein (Dastur 2004).

This line of interpretation has led Dastur (2004) to contextualize Heidegger’s phenomenological decade by way of references to his readings of Kant’s first Critique, and more specifically, the doctrine of apperception as auto-affection, in addition to the much-noted importance of the faculty of imagination and of schematism. Examining Heidegger’s Kant interpretations of the phenomenological decade, she finds the metaphysical structure of Heideggerian temporality to replicate that of (or at least bear great resemblance to) Kantian apperception, which then extends the affinity of Heideggerian phenomenology through Husserl to Kantian transcendental philosophy. While defending this transcendental reading of the phenomenological Heidegger, she also suggests that Heidegger’s awareness of this idealist ‘excess’ leads him to compensate from an opposing standpoint in his works subsequent to the 1920s. Finally, it is also noteworthy that Dastur has rigorously defended her construal of the phenomenological Heidegger against later systematic criticisms from Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida, e.g. in Dastur (2016).

Another long-term project dedicated to elaborating and clarifying the sense of phenomenology in Heidegger’s writings, particularly in light of his relationship to Brentano (as well as to Neo-Kantianism), is in the work of Jean-Francois Courtine. While Husserl readers are familiar with Brentano from the latter’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Courtine emphasizes the importance of Brentano’s work on Aristotle’s ontology and psychology, in order to show a continuity of concerns with Heidegger. Heidegger had himself referred to Brentano’s early study On the Manifold Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862) as having been formative for his path and Courtine has been able to elaborate on this in some detail, e.g. in Courtine (2005). While Aristotle writes that being (to on) is ambiguous, he spells out the components of that ambiguity in terms of the categories, act/potency, essence/accident, and truth. Brentano had argued that the chief sense driving Aristotle’s conception of being was to be found in the categories. According to Courtine, this type of approach to Aristotle’s ontology is inherited by Heidegger, who then argues for truth as the focal point, instead of the categories. What persists despite the change in focus is an orientation towards a unified, central meaning of being, from which other meanings would eventually be derived. Much like Dastur, Courtine thus construes Heidegger’s central problematic as an ontological one. Indeed, to a large extent, Heidegger’s ontological interest appears firmly situated in the tradition of the medieval doctrine of the ‘analogy of being,’ Courtine (2005). However, through a series of transformations, Courtine shows that the topic of this ontology is givenness itself (Gegebenheit) and Heidegger thereby rejoins Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as inquiry into the origin of the given. Pursuing the thread of the given in the early manuscripts up to SZ, Courtine (2007) elaborates the phenomenological aspect of the investigation by reference to Heidegger’s notions of ‘factical life’ and facticity. This usage of terms related to life, leben, Erlebnis, is also an instance of Heidegger engaging with philosophers of his period. Another instance thereof can be found in the development of Heidegger’s views on logic and language. Here, Heidegger is seen as engaging with Husserl’s but also Lotze’s views, in particular when he formulates a phenomenological critique of judgment as the site of truth (Courtine 2007).

In general, the interpretations of Heidegger that have integrated the writings of his first decade into phenomenology – and done this with a specific historical sense – have been written by authors who have published equally as much on Husserl. This is the case for Dastur and Courtine, as mentioned above, but also for Bernet (1994), who for his part explicates continuities but can also articulate criticism of some of Heidegger’s positions, for example on the issue of the hierarchy of temporalities in SZ.

Among the younger generation of phenomenological readers of Heidegger, the work of Alexander Schnell stands out. Schnell (2005) argues that Heidegger’s development through 1929 exhibits an almost unnoticed shift from the problem of being to a phenomenology of world (which is then inherited by Eugen Fink). More interestingly, Schnell (2010) analyzes the relationship between subjectivity and temporality and develops an original conception of transcendental philosophy, which he integrates with Heidegger’s phenomenology. Starting in the first Critique and then working through the major authors of Classical German Philosophy, Schnell emphasizes the function of notions of possibility in the definition of the transcendental project, arguing that Heidegger’s phenomenological project (in addition to those of Husserl and Fink) attributes a central role to possibilization, or making possible, Ermöglichung.

5 Phenomenological Critique of Kantian Reflection via Temporality

If we were to now outline the phenomenological interpretation of Heidegger in broad strokes, we might say that (1) it takes Heidegger’s goal to be ontology, in a sense much more traditional than not, (2) it involves a form of phenomenological method that is an extension of Husserlian method, (3) it construes this method as a transcendental one, and (4) it engages Heidegger’s theory of time in depth, as the culminating element of the phenomenological decade. In this final section I would like to briefly outline an example of an active research project situated within the genealogical reading, loosely construed, and conforming to the above features.

To begin with, we establish a philological basis: we are here limiting ourselves to GA 21, Logic: The Question Concerning Truth, GA 25, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, GA 3, Kant and he Problem of Metaphysics – the Kant readings from the phenomenological decade. Heidegger’s Kant readings from the period of SZ have long been interpreted as an important ingredient in the history of SZ. We propose instead to take the Kant readings as part of the genealogy of the Kant-book, GA3 and not of SZ. By taking the systematic treatise out of that development we can construe the 1929 Kant-book as an installment in the project, promised in SZ, of a critical engagement with the history of philosophy by way of the concept of time. The Kant-book is then an instantiation of the destruction of the history of ontology that follows the guiding thread of temporality – which was promised in the introduction to SZ.

This modest philological reordering might seem inconsequential at first blush but it opens novel implications in Heidegger’s Kant encounter. When we subordinate GA3 to SZ, we can evaluate, or situate Kant, based on the argumentative framework supplied by fundamental ontology, particularly with respect to the notion of time. Based on the variety of temporalizations elucidated in division two of SZ (authentic time, inauthentic time, the time of concern, common Now time), we can reflect on the significance of Kantian thought having access to that particular temporal conception which it employs. At a very basic level, this means that we would read the Kant-book not as an interpretation but more as an argument in a systematic context. Thus, we can wholly eschew the question of the soundness of Heidegger’s interpretation. The importance of subordinating GA3 to SZ lies in the following. The Kant-book (1929) contains substantially less detail in the analysis of temporality than does SZ (1927). This is not because Heidegger had abandoned that detailed theory in 1929. Noticing exactly which instance of temporality from the SZ-account recurs in GA3 makes the critical nature of Heidegger’s encounter clear. Heidegger argues that in the Kantian context, very simply put, time is to be equated with the Self. We then explicate which concept of time and what understanding of Self, thereby refocusing attention on the critical dimension in these readings.

Throughout his interpretations of Kant (that is, in GA 21, GA 25, GA 3), Heidegger develops a link between subjectivity and temporality. If we can expand on this in detail as far as the temporal side of the subjectivity-temporality equation is concerned, then we must also pay close attention to what is understood by subjectivity in that equation. Our analysis of that claim, in all its manifestations, shows that the sense of subjectivity invoked there bears profoundly idealist affinities. We can show how Heidegger, in each one of his different engagements with Kant from 1925 to 1929, despite the differing interpretative routes he takes within the first Critique on different occasions (again in GA21, GA 25, GA 3), each time, Heidegger construes Kantian subjectivity in a manner which hearkens strongly back to idealist conceptions. Previous commentators, hewing closely to Heidegger’s own stated declarations, have emphasized the notion of finitude in these texts, and have thus been prevented from affirming the idealist affinities of Heidegger’s Kant. Again, whether the focus of Heidegger’s reading is on apperception as auto-affection or on the imagination, whether he more deeply investigates the Transcendental Aesthetic or the Schematism, the A deduction or the B deduction, and these are all variations that occur between 1925 and 1929, in all readings, Heidegger emphasizes patterns of auto-position in Kant – whether this invokes ‘positing’ (setzen) explicitly, or renders positing through the lexicon of form (bilden, Bild).

As we mentioned already, Heidegger’s SZ presented a plurality of concepts of time. Now, it is crucial to note that these different instances of time are not merely a set of independent descriptions. Heidegger’s aim was not to catalogue the variety of temporal experience. Rather, on Heidegger’s account, each notion of time has some domain of validity or applicability. Furthermore, the various instances of time exhibit relations of foundation and derivation amongst each other. Now, in the course of our project we are able to identify the persistence of a specifically derivative temporality in Heidegger’s Kant interpretations – what he terms the temporality of concern. We then recall that this is always occurring within a reading of Kant (albeit unfolding along different textual routes). If the Kant readings, despite their variety, keep linking a derivative temporality with a notion of the Self, then perhaps this is because according to Heidegger’s SZ framework, Kant’s idealist standpoint on the Self and Subjectivity can only lead to a derivative temporality. If the amount of textual evidence pointing to an idealist Self in the Kant interpretations cannot be overlooked, then the most plausible reading seems to suggest that, for Heidegger, the Kantian philosophy of reflection, Reflexionsphilosophie, is limited to a temporality of concern.

With SZ as backdrop, we can claim that the instance of temporality which is disclosed through Kant never accedes to what is termed authentic temporality, namely running ahead-repeating-instant. Instead, the temporality of subjectivity is, in all three of Heidegger’s approaches to Kant, a time derived out of Nows. This is the case when Heidegger focuses on apperception, when he focuses on the three syntheses of the A Deduction and when he focuses on the formative imagination. While Heidegger’s three approaches show chronologically progressive depth, they never break beyond the confines of the temporality of concern and of what he terms ‘common’ Now-time. Thus the lesson of the three Kant readings is that the philosophy of reflection, the philosophy construing the self as idealist auto-position, is bounded by and limited to the derivative time of concern and of the Now.

The argument of the Kant book as concerns temporality is not a modification of the argument of SZ nor is it simply identical to it. It is rather, a deriving of the SZ conception’s implications for Reflexionsphilosophie. Contrary to what might be thought when the texts are lined-up strictly chronologically, authentic temporality is not the absolute subjectivity of the idealist tradition. It is rather the ground of absolute subjectivity.

The consistent evolution of the Marburg Kant-readings, from before SZ to after, shows that construing these to be the culmination of SZ temporality is mistaken. The idealist reading of temporality is fatally flawed hermeneutically. SZ is not a piece of that development, rather the Kant-interpretation of the 1920s shows that the philosophy of reflection is bound to the temporality of concern.